For those of you thinking about attribution management solutions, one of the most important things to know before beginning your evaluation process is that marketing attribution measurement will
significantly change the practice of marketing within your organization. Unlike other technologies, attribution is not just a piece of software that sits in a corner and is pulled out every now
and then to solve a specific issue or meet an ad hoc need. It’s a tool that you will live and breathe with every day. But even the easiest to learn, use and navigate
attribution software will need to be operationalized within your organization, and that’s not necessarily a simple matter.
Attribution is a New Approach
A
more accurate statement might be that attribution is a paradigm shift that impacts many aspects of your marketing process. Here are just a few of the ways that marketing measurement currently
affects the decision-making of most marketing organizations:
- Shapes media planning and strategy
- Optimizes in-market media
- Evaluates media that has already run
- Gauges your media team’s performance
- Allocate media budgets to the right channels
- Drives creative development and evaluates costs
In fact, media
measurement can’t be decoupled from media itself. Right now, everyone in your organization is probably using the last ad metrics to drive all of these activities. What if you
discovered that upwards of 70 percent of all of your media elements (placements and keywords) were being over- or under-valued by more than 20 percent? That’s generally what we see when we
compare last ad and algorithmic multi-touch attribution. If this holds true for your own media, it means that almost three out of every four decisions you make based on your performance
data could be totally off the mark.
A Shared Focus & Shared Rewards
So to get on target, your organization will have to change and adapt to implement a
marketing attribution solution. A common set of key performance indicators will have to be established across all channels of your enterprise, and business rules will need to be established so
that marketing performance data is normalized to those KPIs. Your agencies and marketing platform providers will need to be consulted and adapt themselves. Compensation and incentives that may
have been based on individual channel performance may need to be adapted to focus on a shared enterprise goal. Cooperation and integration will need to be rewarded and any silo-centric mentality
eliminated. In effect, your environment will need to change so that everyone is pulling from the same end of the rope.
Not Their First Rodeo
The good news is that
attribution management software providers have gone through this process with many clients -- of various business models, verticals, sizes and hierarchies (and their agencies/partners) – many
times before. They have built processes, created conversion/business rule templates, formed API relationships and “built the plumbing” to be as efficient and accurate as possible,
ensuring this process is painless for brands and their agencies to undertake. You need to rely on them; it’s not their first rodeo. They need to hold your hand and guide you throughout
this daunting process.
Worth The Effort
The good news is that once implemented, these changes will provide the media strategy teams with the proper insights they need
to do their jobs, the analysts the right optimization directions to execute, and more. It will be very rewarding to see how attribution truly provides a much more accurate picture of how media
is working in synergy and to watch as your optimization efforts pay off in increased ROI virtually every time. What you will find is that the strategy and optimization you were
implementing using last ad metrics really had little to no value – and that in some cases it was even counterproductive and decisions applied via these metrics actually generated poorer
returns than if left alone!
Yes, adopting and operationalizing attribution is going to be a challenge in year one, but rely on your attribution solution provider to help with the
organizational and logistical changes that they’ve helped others navigate. Once implemented, you very well may look back on how your marketing organization used to function and wonder how
it functioned at all.